Lord, we are subjects of Thy pity, of Thy
compassion; and this morning we do not even know what to
ask of Thee, for we perhaps do not really know our truest
need. We think we know sometimes. There are things which
are very real to us as needs; but, Lord, it is true Thou
knowest all the truest need of our hearts, and only Thou
knowest. According to Thy knowledge, speak Lord—make
it personal—make it individual—as well as
collective, that while Eli did not hear the voice of the
Lord, even in the tabernacle, there was one who did. Pick
us out for speaking this morning. As Thou didst call,
“Samuel, Samuel,” may we be called by name. May
we know the Lord is speaking to us. Do not allow our
minds and thoughts to be diverted onto other people or we
shall say that is something for them. But do keep it
directly, where afterward, we can truly say, “The
Lord has spoken to me.” Now for all that is needed,
Lord, in us and for us—for this, do that by the
wisdom and the power and the grace of Thy Holy Spirit. We
ask it, in the Name of the Lord Jesus, Amen.

By now I think you know that there is a book in the New
Testament which is called the Letter to the Hebrews, and
I am going to read again from this book this morning. We
are getting very near to the end of this time of
gathering, of ministry, and I feel that it is very
necessary for things to become very definite and concrete
and that we should at this time expect the Lord to be
focusing things on very clearly defined issues.

But once again, let us read at the beginning of this
letter, chapter one: “God, having of old time
spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by diverse
portions and in diverse manners, hath at the end of these
days spoken unto us in His Son, Whom He appointed Heir of
all things, through Whom also He made the worlds; Who
being the effulgence of His glory, and the very image of
His substance, and upholding all things by the Word of
His Power, when He had made purification of sins, sat
down on the right hand of the Majesty on high.”
And again at chapter twelve, verse 18: “Ye are
not come unto a mount that might be touched”;
verse 22, “But ye are come unto Mount Zion, and
unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem.”

I could almost wish that we forget that word Zion, as
such, if it represents a subject. We must look through
Zion because, you see, what we have in the beginning of
this letter is “God hath spoken.” In
Zion? No! God hath spoken through Zion. God hath spoken
in His Son. If we have used the Old Testament name, which
is always a type and a symbol, we have used it to help us
by gathering up all the historic associations of that
name in the Old; but let us remember, it still belongs to
the “not.” As to a name and as to a
place and as to a thing, a mountain and so forth, it
belongs to the “not.” What belongs to
the “but” is what lies behind that
name Zion, its spiritual value, its spiritual meaning,
its spiritual lesson. And if we were asked, “What is
that, what is its spiritual value, its spiritual
meaning?”—we have got to come back and answer:
“God has spoken in His Son, ...He has spoken in
His Son, Whom He appointed Heir of all things, through
Whom He made the worlds.”

God has spoken. Now, how has He at the end of those times
spoken? The speaking of God from a certain point in
history on to the end is “in His Son.”
Is it necessary to clarify that and say His speaking is
not “about” His Son?—not the teaching, the
doctrine, of Christ, but the Person—in the Person!
He hath spoken in a Person. Do try to get hold of that,
dear ones. It is in Him, in Christ, that God speaks! Now
let us try to break that up for a few moments.

Zion, if you are going to use the name, is in
representation the fulness of Christ. That is what this
letter is about, fulness and finality in Christ. And
Zion, as a name, represents that. The fulness of
God’s Son—that is Zion; and that fulness is
God’s speech for and in this dispensation.
God’s speech is the fulness that is in His Son.God’s Speech Is the Fulness
That Is in His Son

Now you remember when you go back to the beginning of
the Old Testament and God has intervened in the history
of this earth in what is called “the creation,”
it all begins with that word “God”—“In
the beginning, God.” In the beginning, God. And
then what? God spake. God said, “Let there be
light” and so on. God spoke and out of His
speaking everything came. You come over to your New
Testament and although the Gospel of John is not arranged
first, that is, chronologically (and for quite a good
heavenly reason, the Holy Spirit’s wisdom), the
Gospel of John really does stand at the beginning because
the other three gospels begin on this earth in history,
they begin at Bethlehem in Matthew and Luke or, as in the
case of Mark, at the beginning of the ministry of Jesus.
But John overleaps all time and goes right back to the
dateless beginning, and he opens with this: “In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God... and the Word became flesh.”
Here in this new beginning of a New Creation, of a new
order, the “but” era, God speaks the
Word.

We have heard something this week about “the
Logos.” I am not trying to add, and certainly
not to improve, but I am going to say a little more about
that. As you know, “the Logos” is
“the Word” there in John, “In
the beginning was the Logos, the Logos was with God, the
Logos was God... and the Logos became flesh, tabernacled
among us.” In the beginning was the Logos. Of
course, John has taken that word from the Greek, which in
the Greek world had its own particular meaning.
[1] THE WORD, THE LOGOS, WAS DIVINE THOUGHT:—THE
MIND AND THOUGHT OF GOD BEHIND EVERYTHING ELSE.

First of all, in the Greek mind, the word “logos”
meant “a thought, something in the mind”: that
is where it begins, “the thought” or, if you
like to make it general, “thoughts.” Logos is,
first of all, thoughts or a thought. Then, keeping to the
Greek, “logos” is “the expression
of the thought,” the thought put into expression. It
may be words, but it is what is in the mind expressed,
given expression. That is the content of “logos.”
It may or may not go beyond that in the Greek, but in the
Bible it certainly does.

It is true that “Logos, the Word,” was
Divine thought, something in the mind of God first before
ever there was expression or utterance. Something that
was the mind of God. “In the beginning, in the
beginning was the mind, the thought, of God.” What a
large world that door opens up. You have got the whole of
our New Testament there, the mind and thought of God
behind everything else. But then, that mind and thought
of God was expressed, was given expression. “God
said.” Out of His thought, out of His
mind—God said. As Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians:
“God, Who commanded the light to shine out of
darkness, hath shined in our hearts.” God said,
by expression. And what happened? Ah, that is the point.
That is “the Word, the Logos.”
[2] THE WORD, THE LOGOS, OF THE LORD IS A DIVINE
ACT:—WHEN GOD EXPRESSES HIS MIND SOMETHING HAPPENS,
IT IS A FIAT.

You see (and follow me closely now for I am going to
perhaps be exacting on you for concentration for a little
while), when God expresses His mind, it is not something
just in language, in verbiage, in diction, but something
happens. Whenever God spoke, and whenever God speaks,
something happens. God’s speaking according to the
Bible is always an act. “He spake, and it was
done; He commanded, and it stood fast.” The
Word of the Lord is an act. In Hebrews, you come to
chapter four: “The Word of God is quick,
powerful, sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even
to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the
joints and marrow,” and so on. God’s Word
is an act. It is a Fiat, something happens. God’s
thought put into expression resolves itself into
something that was not before. You can never be the same
after God has spoken. Even if you were to refuse it,
resist it, that has been a crisis. So Jesus will say,
“The word which I spoke, that will judge him in
the last day.” They shall judge you, and me, in
the last day. If you do not believe in Me, the words that
I speak, you will have to meet those in the last
day—because this is something not just said but
something put into the universe which is a crisis. The
Word of God is a crisis. The Word of God is an act:
“He spake, and it was done; He commanded, and it
stood fast.”
[3] THE WORD, THE LOGOS, IS A PERSON:—THE MIND, THE
EXPRESSION, THE ACT OF GOD BECOMES INCARNATE, IT IS IN A
PERSON.

But that does not exhaust the word “Logos”
as used by John and as “the Word of God”
in the Bible. There is a third aspect to the Word. True,
it is the thought, the mind or the mindedness of God.
True, the Logos is the expression of God by which
something happens. It is the act of God, but then the
third aspect of Logos Is Its Person. It takes up its
residence in a Person, it becomes personal; in other
words, it becomes Incarnate. The mind of God, the
expression of God is Incarnate. It is in a Person. Any
encounter with Jesus Christ is a crisis. Any encounter
with Jesus Christ is meeting God. God was in Christ. It
is an encounter with God. It is not just what Jesus says,
although that is an expression of the mind of God in
words, but, it is a personal encounter that has to be. In
the first place, it is not an encounter with what is
written, not an encounter with words—it is an
encounter with a Person. “The Word became flesh,”—
Incarnate.

So, let us go over again the third aspect of the Logos:
the incarnation of the Divine thought in a practical
issue in history, in an act, in a Fiat; it was an act of
the Incarnate and Glorified Word of God. Ask Saul of
Tarsus whether his encounter with Jesus on the Damascus
Road was a Fiat. The whole dispensation answers that very
loudly. This is the Logos. “God hath spoken in
His Son” —Who is the embodiment of His
Mind, Who is the expression of That Mind, Who is the
incarnation of That Mind. And this whole Letter to the
Hebrews is just an analyzing of that or a summing up of
that: God speaking, God speaking In His Son! God speaking
in His Son; and all which follows that, from chapter one
at its beginning right through to the end, is just the
exposition of God speaking in His Son. You must read the
Hebrew Letter in the light of that. God is speaking.

So when you come to Hebrews in chapter twelve, at this
section from verse twenty-two onward, what have
you?—You have the gathering up of that speaking of
God in His Son and concentrating it. And if you break up
the section, you will see it is a concentration of what
is true about the Person of the Lord Jesus; and you must
look at Zion like that. It begins there. “Ye are
come to...” well, we say “Zion, the
city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem...”?—No!
that is symbolic language. We are come to the Son of God
in all His meaning. God speaking in His Son: the thought
of God expressed, the thought of God Incarnate,
Personified, so that “Zion,” as a
typical word or name, is the embodiment of all that.

God speaks, or in the Old Testament God spoke in Zion. He
spoke out of Zion. You go through the Psalms and you go
through Isaiah’s prophecies, especially the last
chapters of those prophecies, and refer to them again.
You go through them presently and see how God is speaking
out of Zion. It even comes to this: “The Lord...
shall roar out of Zion” (Joel 3:16). God speaks
out of Zion; in other words, out of His Son, hath spoken
in His Son. Now, having stated that, what is the heart of
all this, according to the statement at the beginning?
“God, hath at the end of these days, in
these times, in this time, hath spoken in Son.”
How? How?—Sonwise—“In Son.”
The absence of the definite article “His”
before the word “Son,” the absence of
“His” in the original text, does not make any
difference, because the very next statement is: “Whom
He appointed Heir of all things.” So this Son
is His Son. We note that and pass on.

The Governing Law of God’s
Speaking Is Sonship

The governing law of God’s speaking is
sonship,— sonship. That is the thing which governs
God in all His speaking. Sonship. And as has already been
said, sonship is not a beginning thing. It is a final
thing, it is an ultimate thing. Here is Romans eight
again: “waiting for our adoption,” the
manifestation of the sons. The end which governs all
God’s speaking in Christ is sonship. If you would
like to change the word, it is “adoption.”
It is put at the end. Sonship—adoption, is an end,
an object, toward which God is moving by the speaking in
His Son.

By birth, we are children: by adoption, we are sons. And
it is just here that we must remember there is a
difference between the spiritual conception of adoption
and the secular. Someone holding a little baby yesterday,
not of the family or even of the same race, said,
“You see, I have adopted her.” Oh, no, that
will not do here. That is not the scriptural conception
of adoption. As you have been told, the scriptural
meaning of adoption is someone already in the family by
birth who has grown to maturity and then comes the day of
maturity, the coming of age, the celebration, the
festivity, the coming of age day, when the father takes
his own child, now mature, puts the toga on him, invests
him with the symbols and insignia of authority to be as
the father in this world. Everyone meeting that adopted
son has to reckon with the father. He is, in effect, the
father. He has been adopted or, the word really in
Hebrews is, placed. Placed in this position of
responsibility because of maturity. Now we will have to
come back to that from another standpoint as we go on.

What I am saying is that this is the end to which God is
working. His beginning is begetting. His beginning is
birth from above, bringing in a family. But, mark you,
even in the born child there is the spirit of adoption.
The adoption has not come yet, but there is the spirit of
adoption. That is what Paul says, in essence, in Romans
and Galatians: “because we have the spirit of
adoption we cry, Abba, Father.”

I think once when I was here before I told you what that
really means. What does “Abba” mean?
Why put the two things together, is it just two words of
different languages?—“Abba” in
one language, “Father” in another.
What is it? “Abba” is the quality, not the
relationship, it is the quality of a child, a little
child. And when a little child turns to its Father and
says, “dear Father”—you have got “Abba.”
It is a heart relationship. Abba—dear Father. There
is something very close, very intimate. It is a mark of
spiritual infancy. Of course, that is the first thing we
lisp, is it not? When we are really born from above, we
do not say when we go to pray: “Almighty Most
Terrible and Fearful God. . . .” Our first lisp is,
“Our Father.” That is the beginning of
the Christian life. We have the Spirit of adoption,
although we have not come to the adoption yet. That is
coming if we allow the Spirit of adoption to develop us
for adoption. That is the whole course of the spiritual
life.

ALL THE DISCIPLINE OF THE CHILDREN
OF GOD IS GOVERNED BY THIS ONE OBJECT: SONSHIP.

Well, that is all here, and I am saying that the final
object toward which God the Holy Spirit is working is
what is called adoption, sonship. It is governing
everything, it is governing everything. It is the end
which is brought to bear upon the whole course. What is
God doing? Well, Hebrews will tell you. All the
discipline, all the discipline of the child of God, of
the children of God, is governed by this one
object—sonship. So you have: “My son,
despise not thou the chastening of the Lord, for whom the
Lord loveth (His children) He chasteneth, He disciplines.
He scourges every son to be set by Him, to be placed.”
That is the discipline of the Christian life. “And
what child, or what potential son, is he who has no
discipline, whom the Father chasteneth not?” As
you know, the writer uses a very strong word about such.
They are not true sons, they are illegitimate children
who have come into a false position, if they be without
discipline.

There is a tremendous revolt against discipline in this
world, throwing off of authority and all control, all
government, all discipline. There is a revolt against it
everywhere, especially in youth. The Word says that is
how it is going to be at the end: “disobedient
to parents” and so on. This does not at all go
well for God’s final purpose of a family, not of
infants but of grown sons, chastened for eternal
responsibility. God’s final purpose, grown sons
chastened for eternal responsibility—governmental
position in the Kingdom in the ages to come. There is so
much about that in the New Testament. That is Ephesians.
Discipline, for that. Dealings of God with us in this way
for that!

Oh, look again at this illustrated. If you want, look
again to the history of Zion. What a disciplined thing
Zion was. God was having no nonsense with Zion. God was
tolerating nothing less than His full thought in Zion.
When Zion deprived Him of what He had brought Zion into
being for, He then set Zion aside, showed that He had no
longer interest in that as a thing. He disciplined Zion.
Read again your Psalms. Read again the prophets. They are
all concerned, as we shall show, with Zion. What
discipline! What discipline! Through the years, and
finally the seventy years of exile while in captivity,
what discipline of the people of Zion.

Shall we just look for a moment at Isaiah. I did say a
little while ago that as you look at the last chapters of
Isaiah, you will find these final chapters are all
concerned with Zion. Let us look, shall we, at chapter
sixty-one, for we are very near the end of Isaiah when we
come to sixty-one. Or you can go to sixty, if you like,
where it reads, “Arise, shine; for thy light is
come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee.”
But go on to sixty-one: “The Spirit of the Lord
God is upon Me... the Lord hath anointed Me....”
And here again it is the twofold interpretation. Zion is
here pointing on to the other One Who used these very
words and applied them to Himself.

Now to chapter sixty-two. (Cut out the numbers sixty-one
and sixty-two, the chapter divisions being artificial.)
“For Zion’s sake will I not hold My peace,
and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her
righteousness [yes, remember your Amplified, until
her right standing with God, until her right standing
with God] go forth as brightness, and her salvation
as a lamp that burneth... nations shall see thy
righteousness (thy right standing with God), and
all the kings thy glory.”—“I will not
hold My peace” until that happens. This is the cry
of the prophet, and you can go on in these last chapters
of Isaiah and find it is there; and what I am going to
come to in that very connection is this, that Zion was
the burden, the concern, the heartbreak, of the prophets.

Prophetic ministry always focuses upon Zion. The work of
true prophetic ministry (whether in the Old or New
Testament) relates to this Divine thought that is
enshrined in this word “Zion,” as we
have it in the Letter to the Hebrews, to have this
amongst the nations, this expression of the fulness of
Christ in sonship in a corporate body. That is the end
toward which God is working and carrying out all His work
of discipline.

I do want to apply this in a practical way. You see, we,
rightly so, perhaps, are concerned with the work, what we
call the Lord’s work, concerned with evangelism,
getting souls saved. Nothing wrong with that! That is all
right! Do not think I am undervaluing that. The work of
preaching and teaching, and having meetings and
conferences and all that which we can compass by this
word or phrase, “the work of the Lord,” we are
concerned about that. Very much concerned about it.
Perhaps you ministers are very much concerned about your
ministry, that is, the next address that you are going to
give, and you are filling up your notebooks now. You have
got a congregation in view. The work of ministry, of
evangelism, or whatever else may come within that term,
“the work of the Lord,” perhaps you are very
much more than anything else concerned with that. Perhaps
in your concern you say: “We must be in the work, we
must be given to the work.”

Here my brother is going to forgive me because as I have
said, I am trying to focus this thing right down. We have
been having something in the evening meetings that I
consider to be the very essence of the Lord’s
interests. It is the same thing that I am talking about
only in other language: “the overcomer,”
the essence of the Divine thought and intention in Zion.
Our brother has been laid on his back for many weeks, and
we should not have got that if he had not been; and some
of us know that the Lord sometimes sees that it is far
more economical to take us out of “the work”
than to keep us in it, to lay us aside from all our
busyness for Him to get the essence of things. He is
after the essential, the intrinsic. Men are after the
big. Pragmatism governs so much of Christian work. I
venture you do not know what I mean by that word,
“pragmatism.” It means if a thing is
successful, then it is right. That is shallow thinking.
The devil has got a lot of success, is he right?! Many
things are apparently very successful, growing,
increasing, and everybody says, “My, that is the
thing.” Is it? That is pragmatism. If a thing is
successful and popular and everybody is flocking to it,
it must be right.

All right, then. What of Jesus of Nazareth? How they
flocked, they followed. He told why. Why? He said, “...because
you did eat of the loaves and fishes, because you saw the
signs and wonders, and a wicked and adulterous generation
seeketh after signs,” and they flock for that.
But, but—this is short-lived. Short-lived. Presently
they are all forsaking. They are being sifted out. He is
being left alone. All the marks of success are being
withdrawn from this world’s standpoint, and, at
last, is this a successful movement with Him hanging on
the Cross? Is that pragmatic? Well, we know
today!—No, no, a thing is not necessarily right
because people are flocking here or there, crowding,
rushing; not because a thing seems to be gaining much
ground and becoming big, not necessarily. Wait for that.
Wait through the tribulation and then you will get
“great multitudes, which no man can number.”
But that is not pragmatic in this earthly sense.

You see what I mean! There is the discipline, the
discipline of being sifted down from the husks to the
kernel, from the chaff to the wheat. And “wheat
corn is bruised,” says the Prophet Isaiah.
Wheat corn is bruised, it is bruised. He is after the
true genuine bread, and the constitution of that is
something that has been ground to powder, has been
bruised. Does this explain something to you, your own
history?—It is very true, it is the Word, you see.

Therefore there is this section in Hebrews about sonship,
“the chastening of the Lord,”
chastening of the Lord, and chastening for every one of
us may mean something different. What would be chastening
to you would not be to me, but what would be chastening
to me would not be to you. You can get away with lots of
things, but the Lord knows where to find you out, where
you cannot get away. I might be able to force myself
through something on sheer natural soul force. I do not
know whether that is true now, but it might be. Perhaps
in the past it has been true, but the Lord knows just how
to chasten me, and He knows the thing that is chastening
for me and, perhaps, for no one else. Oh, do not just
bring that word “chastening” into a
narrow definition. It is the thing that “gets”
us individually, finds us out. It is the thing, which to
me, is real discipline.

There are some nice, very patient, forbearing,
longsuffering temperaments, and, you know, they can be
spoken to and treated ill and they do not ruffle a bit,
they just go on. But with someone else, the Lord brings a
rather awkward person into their home and, my word, that
person is disciplined. See what I mean? Chastening,
discipline, is what it means to us individually. But
whatever that is, and you may say, “Well, why does
the Lord do this with me? Look, He does not do that with
all these other people. They are getting away with
it”— “until I went into the sanctuary
of God” and saw things from His standpoint.
“The Lord is dealing with me and letting off all
these other people in that way, but He has got me.”
Do I revolt and say, “It is not fair. The Lord is
not fair, He does not do this with other people.”
Oh, no, this attitude will not do. He is focusing upon
this end, this sonship matter, for adoption for eternal
responsibility. Get hold of that, and we will go on.

TRUE SONSHIP: WITHIN A SENSE OF
DESTINY—“THE CALLED ACCORDING TO HIS
PURPOSE.”

With Zion again in the background of our thought, let
us pick out one more thing about Zion. I expect you well
know that in the blood and constitution of a true
Israelite, a true Hebrew, a true Jew, in the very
constitution and blood, there is a consciousness or sense
of destiny. Their thought is: “We are the chosen
people, and we are chosen for God’s purpose and
intention. It is not something that we have taken on as
an ideology, as a philosophy, of our existence, it is in
our blood.” They cannot get away from it. It is
themselves. It is like that. A true Jew, citizen, and
child of Zion has this inwrought sense and consciousness
of destiny. It is the reason, the ground, of why they
have been able to suffer so much, why they could go
through their persecutions and survive, why they could
endure so much. It is not because they make up their
minds, not just the strength of their will, it is
something born in them, part of their very being, it is
elemental to them that they are a people of destiny. They
hold on to it, they cling to it, they are still at the
wailing wall. It was born out of this; however, that
belongs to the “not.”

Here we are with the “but,”—“we
have come to Zion.” And we have come to Zion in
this sense: there is by right, if it is a true
citizenship in heaven, “this one was born there”;
if it is a true child of God, there is something about
such a true child of God that although they may not
define it, they may not know even the Scriptures about
it, within them they have this sense of destiny
that—there is some purpose governing our salvation,
there is some meaning beyond our present comprehension
for which we have been called, there is something in us
in our very constitution that says, “called
according to His purpose.” A sense of destiny, this
is essential to Zion. This is what the New Testament is
all about, and this is what this Letter to the Hebrews is
all about. This is true sonship.

Now, we do not like these ideas, we do not like this
language, but with the Jews, the true Jews, there was
this element in them of “selectiveness.” You do
not like that language, do you? Selective, something
separate, something different, something other, something
not general but particular. The inwrought consciousness
of being called and chosen for something, which we call
destiny. And only that will keep us going through the
discipline, only that will keep us going through the
suffering, the adversity, the perplexity.

Have you not been as I have, more than once and more than
twice, at the point where you would have despaired. Been
left to yourself, you would have given up, and gone out,
and taken another way, and even washed your hands of
Christianity. Have you never been pressed? Well, if you
have not, all right, thank the Lord; but there is such
pressure. Even Paul, with all his wonderful experience
and knowledge of the Lord, came to a point where he said:
“I was pressed out of measure, ...I despaired of
life.” Paul? You despaired?! And you are always
telling people not to despair. You were writing about the
God of hope, and you tell me you despaired? And you told
people to be in the ascendant, on top, and you say:
“I was pressed beyond my measure.” Yes, all
right, perhaps you do not know all that, perhaps you know
a little of it, but the children of Zion are kept by
something. They are held by something. It is this
indefinable something which we call “destiny.”
There is a hold on us that will not let us go. There is a
grip upon us that even when we say we are going, we
cannot go. Even when we come to the depths of
despondency, we do not go out after all. We do not. We
decided to, but we do not. No, it is not something to
analyze and put into a system of teaching, doctrine, but
it is some deep reality that is holding us. We are
children of destiny, “the called according to
His Purpose.” Oh, if you want a little Bible
study, I would like you to go through and underline that
word “according, according as, according to.”
A marvelous word that is with Paul. It is all according
to something. Zion was elect, chosen, separated, made
distinct, because of destiny—its great purpose: and
there was that in its very constitution, in the very
blood, in the very blood, a sense that “There is
something beyond, unto which we have been called.”

Now I am coming back to the prophets. The prophets were
supremely concerned with Zion, just because of
Zion’s destiny. Oh, how burdened they were about
Zion, and, of course, in their case, their burden and
their concern for Zion was the recovery of Zion. Zion had
lost out. Zion had ceased to be what it was called to be,
what God intended. It had lost out, and so the prophets
are all concerned with the recovery of Zion and
Zion’s testimony. That is prophetic ministry.

Oh, prophetic ministry. What do you
mean?—foretelling? foretelling events? All right, if
you like to have that, you can. But the real essence of
prophetic ministry is the recovery of the fulness of
Jesus Christ which has been lost. It is a recovery and a
reinstating of the testimony of Jesus in the Church. That
is true prophetic ministry, and do not bring prophetic
ministry down to this and that and something else. The
gift of prophecy. What is the gift of prophecy? Only
foretelling? It may be that, or it may never be that at
all and still be the gift of prophecy. The gift, the
function, the anointing, of prophecy is the recovery of
the full testimony of Jesus, the recovery ministry that
does not have that as its objective, clear and strong and
definite, is not prophetic ministry. The prophets were
thus burdened. Read Isaiah 43 again in the light of that.

Test Everything By Its Eternal,
Spiritual Value

Well, now, we come near the end of this morning. Again
then, Zion is the embodiment of the spiritual values of
Jesus Christ. Underline that word “spiritual
values.” Test everything, test everything by the
spiritual values. Test everything not from the standpoint
of pragmatism at all but from the standpoint of its
spiritual, which means, its eternal value. The ministry
of anyone, my own or anyone else’s, is not going to
be judged by the number of conventions or meetings at
which we speak and the amount of Bible teaching that we
give—it is never going to be judged by that.
Understand that. You may have your diaries full of
engagements, preaching engagements; you may be on the way
of a very, very busy Bible teacher; you may be very busy,
and you may have no time for anything else; and yet, with
all the sum total, it is not going to be judged, dear
friends, by how much you have done in that way. It is
going to be judged by its eternal, spiritual value; what
the essential spiritual value is when this life is gone,
when I am gone, when you are gone, when all the teachers
are gone, and we arrive in heaven and discover what was
taken up then in our lifetime and is there. “The
things which are seen are temporal,” in the
preachers and the teachers and the conferences. “The
things which are seen are temporal; but the things which
are not seen are eternal.” And that is the
standpoint of Zion, the essential spiritual value of
everything.

Are you, dear preachers, teachers, really burdened in
heart that every bit of your ministry shall have a
spiritual, eternal value? Not the address, not the
address! No, it is not whether my address is successful,
accepted, or not. It is what is the spiritual, lasting
value from eternity’s and heaven’s standpoint
of anything. Surely our ambition ought to be that when it
is all over here, when it is all over, when there are no
more conferences down here, no more ministries and
addresses down here, and we all gather above, our
ambition is to find there people who say: “Look
here, I would not be here but for what the Lord did in me
through your ministry.” That is it, is it not? Oh,
focus upon that, for Zion is, let me repeat, the
embodiment of spiritual values. Not a place, not a sect,
not anything temporal. That is not Zion. Now it is the
concentrated and intrinsic values of Jesus Christ. That
is Zion.

God’s Jealousy For Zion

Upon what note shall I finish this morning? Well, with
all that in view, of course, the right note would be
God’s jealousy for Zion. Prophets shared the
jealousy of God for Zion. The Lord said: “I am
jealous for Zion, with great jealousy, and I am jealous
for her with great wrath. I am returned unto Zion, and
will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem.” Where is
God’s heart set? Not on any temporal expression of
the old Zion. That is the “not.” But
God’s jealousy, God’s concern, God’s
wrath, relates to the true, intrinsic, spiritual values
of His Son Jesus Christ. He is focused upon that. He will
look after those spiritual values. He will look after the
spiritual values. That ought to comfort us in the
ministry, especially. See, people may repudiate, may
discredit, and may go away and leave us. All right, that
discipline is pretty hard. But wait awhile, perhaps in
their own lifetime, they will come back or they will
confess: “Look here, I got something from you which
has been my real salvation. I did not recognize it at the
time, but I know now that what you were saying, what you
were doing, was the thing which has become my
deliverance, my salvation, in the time of trouble.”

Well, it is like that. God will look after the spiritual
values if you are concerned more with spiritual values
than building up something big down here. That is where
His jealousy is. Sooner or later His wrath will be shown
from Zion. In that sense, the enemies will have to bow,
they will have to surrender. As in the eternity, “every
knee shall bow, and tongue confess.” All the
enemies of Christ are going to be very much humbled. God
is going to roar out of Zion. Well, let us be quite sure
that it is Zion in this sense: “Ye are come to that,
to Zion.” Let us leave it there for now. The Lord
interpret. We pray:

We do pray that, Lord, this very hour may be used by Thee
to produce those essential eternal values. Not just be an
hour with ministry, more or less appreciated, but that
there may be something wrought, something planted,
something put inside us constitutionally, that shall
appear in heaven and in glory as the Divine fiat, the
Word, the Word of God, which did something. So help us.
Seal this time then, in that way; forgiving all mistakes
and errors and faults in the human, and take charge of
Thine Own Interests, for Thy Name’s Sake, Amen.